LightPress is a frontend for the popular WordPress blogging platform. A frontend is the code sitting between the db and your blog’s readers, which manages all user interaction and displays the relevant content appropriately formatted. I started this project because, even though WordPress is easy to install and has plenty of features, it has a couple of serious drawbacks for a non-casual user: it’s slow, its queries are suboptimized, and its code has clear distinction between program logic and layout, making customization very boring and time-consuming. In contrast, the principles behind LightPress are ones I have learned learned by trial and error in more than ten years of Web development: